The 2011 Publication of President Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate Image Set Off a Firestorm of Accusations.

Perhaps the strangest technical adventure I’ve been involved with was my analysis of the computer file showing an image of the birth certificate of the President of the United States.

In April of 2011, rumors that President Barack Obama had been born outside of the United States led to the President posting an image of his long-form Hawaiian birth certificate on the White House web site. This was presented to the public in an Adobe PDF file.

The internet was immediately flooded with observations of “anomalies” in this file, along with claims that it was a hand-created forgery produced using Photoshop or some similar graphics program. Various “experts” in computer technology and graphics instantly appeared to proclaim the file a “100% forgery.”

Eventually, the Sheriff of one of the most populous counties in America — Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes the city of Phoenix — held a press conference in which he declared the President’s birth certificate a “proven” forgery.

It was a situation that caught my interest — well before Sheriff Arpaio’s rather odd press conference — both for technological and political reasons.

During the summer of 2011, my initial probings turned into an analysis of the President’s birth certificate image from pretty much every conceivable angle — as well as a full-fledged book. As time went on, I also became quite involved in the historical, legal and Constitutional question of the meaning of “natural born citizen” as well, and wrote the equivalent of a second book just on that topic.

Over the past 2-1/2 years, both topics have been analyzed to death. I am pleased that my analysis and writings on both issues have been confirmed, confirmed, and reconfirmed.

If this is a topic that interests you, there’s lots to read at my separate web site that was dedicated to investigating the questions — both technical and legal — surrounding Barack Obama’s eligibility to be President. Readers and customers from both sides of the aisle, please note that the question was never one of politics for me — it was a simple matter of the technical and historical truth. I also felt I was doing a service by providing truthful and accurate answers to questions that quite a few Americans were asking. That those answers may have disappointed some was inevitable, whichever direction the investigation took.

While I have never been a political supporter of this particular President, I also have never believed that we should support a political agenda, even if that agenda is good, with falsehood. If our agenda is right, then it can, should and will speak for itself.